GISCO Working Party 25-26 October 2001 GIS for NATURA 2000 Paul Smits, Stephen Peedell, Alessandro Annoni, European Commission Directorate General Joint Research Centre Institute for Environment & Sustainability Land Use & Land Cover Unit 21020 Ispra (VA), Italy GISCO Working Party 25-26 October 2001

Presentation Overview Background on Natura2000 Project Objectives Project Participants Progress in Data Validation Progress in System Design & Development Future Activities

Natura2000 - European Nature Conservation Policy European network of nature conservation sites designated by Member States under the Birds Directive and the Habitats Directive Managed by European Commission Directorate General Environment Specific funding under LIFE (1996-1999 309 Nature Conservation Projects, 200M Euro) 12-15000 Sites EU 15 12% of EU Territory Organised by Biogeographic Zones Site list under review until 2004 Enlargement - LIFE projects already underway in Romania http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/environment/nature/home.htm

Project Objectives Harmonise the existing Natura2000 data  Acquire additional data  Collect, model and document user requirements  Design and test an integrated spatial data model  Prototype, test and implement GIS applications

Project Participants A collaborative effort between JRC, DG-Environment and Eurostat-GISCO Supporting agencies: European Topic Centre on Nature Conservation (ETC-NC) and European Environment Agency (EEA) Users: DG Regional Policy DG Agriculture DG Transport Member States The Citizen

Progress in Data Validation 5500 sites validated so far Ensure integrity between Natura2000 database and digital data A labour intensive process, assisted by development of GISVAL, a tool developed by JRC in ArcView to provided automatic validation of key spatial parameters Validation effort has also raised awareness of requirements for GIS-ready data, resulting in improvements in updated and new data provided by MS This activity must be completed before a site can be published in the official list Ongoing activity, carried out under contract Parallel key activity of maintaining catalogue of paper maps (over 10,000 items).

GIS Prototype Architecture - Design JRC analysis of user requirements (focused on DG-ENV) Logical modelling in UML Implementation of physical schema at JRC Currently testing GeoDatabase, and application development in standard Commission GIS environment (Oracle/ESRI)

Conclusions & Future Activities GIS for Natura2000 activity is still dominated by database harmonisation issues The requirements analysis showed that the priority applications are mostly driven by administrative requirements, reflecting the needs of the DG-ENV users There is a vast scope for the development of thematic applications, including indicators, modelling & visualisation Reference data availability at the Natura2000 project scale (1:10,000) remains problematic at European level